Cartoonistry

Category: Creative Process

This week is my 24th anniversary as the editorial cartoonist for the Palm Beach Daily News. I have created a cartoon every Sunday since March 1992. That adds up to more than 1,240 cartoons.

I’ve shared how I

Once I have a good working sketch, I save it and reopen it in my paint program, Corel Painter, which allows me to convert the sketch to a tracing layer that can be turned on and off visually but won’t appear in the finished art.

Using a digital drawing tablet and stylus, the software enables me to emulate painting in any natural medium such as [More]

It was not a great year for peace of mind, but it provided a lot of material for Palm Beach Daily News editorial cartoons.

I had a lot to cartoon about from the beginning with the Town Council election campaigns. The election should have been easy sledding — just a couple of council seats contested on the ballot — but ended up being elevated to an expensive no-holds-barred brouhaha. The memory of the Royal Poinciana Way zoning district controversy was resurrected to spread fear and loathing among the electorate by the Palm Beach Preservation Alliance. Between that, warnings of greedy developer secret agents [More]

It is not unusual when I meet someone for the first time to be asked, “What do you do for a living?” I wish you could see the expressions on people’s faces when I tell them that I am a cartoonist. Typically, it’s some combination of surprise, delight and fascination. I get a kick out of it.

I’ve held advertising art and creative director positions, owned my own design studio and specialized in ­l­aunching or redesigning print magazines. I’ve also had this editorial cartooning gig with the Palm Beach Daily News for nearly 24 years. When writing my book, Billionaires and Butterfly Ballots, A [More]

When Dame Edna: The Royal Tour was appearing at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in January 2000, it provided me with a fun way to point out that there is much more to the people of Palm Beach than is evident from the town’s glitzy veneer.

Underneath Dame Edna’s blue bouffant wig, surreal cat-eye glasses and bejeweled frock was Australian comedian Barry Humphries, who waxed hilariously about culture and human foibles. This is pretty much the same ground I cover with my cartoons. And much like the Dame Edna character, the nuance in news stories is usually hidden beneath the surface.

Frank Zappa once said, “Art is making something from nothing and then selling it.” In his inimitable contrarian way, Zappa was taking a jab at those artists who believe being motivated by money is “selling out.”

Zappa was an artist in every sense. His work was intricate, precisely crafted and loaded with social commentary. But with album titles such as Weasels Ripped My Flesh, he exhibited entrepreneurial showmanship reminiscent of Salvador Dali.

Rock ’n’ roll paid the bills, but Zappa would occasionally take every penny he could spare and hire an orchestra to record his symphonic pieces, despite knowing they [More]

Since last Wednesday, almost every conversation I have had has begun with “You must feel awful right now,” or “What do you think of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, as an editorial cartoonist?”

Yes, I feel awful about it, as does any rational human being. The idea that anyone would orchestrate a paramilitary attack with the intent of killing an office full of people in order to make a point or take petty revenge is shocking, shameful and downright scary.

The beat that I cover as editorial cartoonist for the Palm Beach Daily News has little in common with that of cartoonists who [More]

What happens when you get an email on Dec. 21 from Palm Beach Daily News columnist Shannon Donnelly and then editor Joyce Reingold saying they want to do a funny Christmas article and illustration for the front page on Dec. 24? Organizational pandemonium, that’s what.

But before I get into the details about that experience in 2009, let me give you a little insight into the process of creating an illustration. When doing an illustration for advertising, it’s important that I pay very close attention to the goals of the client and their agency. Aside from the obvious effort to dramatically [More]

I have always lavished extra attention on drawing automobiles in my cartoons. Rather than work from photographs to draw specific cars, I usually prefer to wing it. I might have a vague type of car in mind but my real pleasure is in making a believable car come to life on paper from nothing.

This probably hearkens back to my early school days when I used to sit in the back of class with a group of 14-year-old classmates and draw Big Daddy Roth-inspired monsters peeling out in Mustangs, GTOs and Stingrays. The cartoon monsters were a pastiche, but not the cars. We [More]

My cartoons have explored different aspects of the holidays over the years, from the festive shopping and dining atmosphere around Palm Beach to overblown commercialism; from hypocrisy and crime to the Palm Beach Daily News toy drive and its wonderful donors.

But one holiday cartoon was largely autobiographical. My Papa-razzi cartoon, published Dec. 27, 1997, portrayed Christmas mornings with my family when I was a kid.

The tabloid paparazzi had been very much in the news for the previous few months because of their supposed role in causing the crash that killed Princess Diana. But this cartoon was about my dad.

Of all the historical accounts I have read about pre-Flagler South Florida, one stands out for its breezy style and ability to take the modern reader back in time, Camping and Cruising in Florida by James A. Henshall.

The book was published in 1884 by Robert Clarke & Co. of Cincinnati and is an account of two sailing expeditions along the wild frontier coast of South Florida.

Henshall was a Kentucky physician who decided the best thing he could do for four chronically ill patients was to take them on a long sailing adventure in Florida’s temperate climate, away from Kentucky fried [More]